I'm putting together a slide show DVD. There are a total of 7 slide shows containing 480 pictures. All pictures are jpg's at less than 1MB each. I have 3 menus for navigation. Not all of the chapter menu buttons point to a "slide show", some of them point to a picture inside certain slide shows according to my client's requests. (example, slide show 1 contains 70 pictures. Chapter 1 points to "slide show 1" Chapter 2 points to "slide show 1 photo 50"). All slide shows are linked so that when the first slide show is over, it will automatically "end action" to the next slide show etc... All my settings are typical. NTSC 4:3 SD 720X480 progressive.

There are NO video files in my DVD at all. No timelines at all. No audio at all. I've read some of the previous posts (one of them is in French for cryin out loud. Had to use Bing translator and it sounds all weird). What I can gather is this,

What John said. Note that the issue is going to be pixel size more than file size. JPGs less than 1MB does not tell us enough. This is the most likely cause.

I found out it was due to selecting an image file as the video layer

in a menu, causes the error everytime. I just paste the image in with

'edit in photoshop' instead now. But thanks."

Another person said just about the same thing... The only problem is, I have no idea what this means. I don't know what it means to "select an image file as the video layer in a menu..."

And if you do figure it out, don't do it! I think they were selecting a still image as a video background for a menu. There is no reason to do that. Use a correctly sized image, and replace the background layer. But you do not appear to be doing this, so it does not apply.

This is the first time that I've done a DVD with this many slides in it. In the past I did a slide show with about 50 pictures (4-5MB each) and Encore crashed in a different way. Called adobe and they didn't even know what was wrong. After resizing to a similar size that I'm using now, it worked fine.

I say that all just to say this. I went through and made sure they were all at a reasonable and workable size. So I figured it would be ok. If size is really the issue, then ok. Is there an easy way to resize 480+ jpg's without spending 2 days opening them all up on photoshop and resizing them one by one? I read (or tried to read) that obnoxiously long forum that "John T Smith" linked but all I gathered is that a person should scale photos down.

But I've gotta say, this sounds like a petty problem if photo size is really the case. They're at a very reasonable size and the DVD is only going to be 1 hour long. Can Encore really not handle 1 hour of slide shows?

Also, if it makes any difference, I noticed that the error message came up after the progress bar finished indicating that Encore processed the Slide Shows. It err'd when it was processing the newly processed videos. I dont' know, that's what it seemed like anyway.

I read (or tried to read) that obnoxiously long forum that "John T Smith" linked but all I gathered is that a person should scale photos down.

First post includes:

"In PS, I have a set of Actions for Video. An Action is like a Script, but less powerful and less involved in the writing. As I have already done all of my image enhancements and additional processing before I did my Copy to the selected folder, I only have to worry about my Action resizing these selected images for use in my Video Project. My Action here is to resize to 720x480 with a PAR of 0.9, and I normally use the Action that does this with a particular resizing algorithm, Bicubic-Smoother (though I also use Bicubic-Sharper on occasion)."

"Actions" in photoshop allow you to put them all in a folderl, specify the output folder, and apply an "action." In this case, the action is to resize as Bill describes.

I haven't done enough of these to say what will work. But I tend to agree that the size you describe is not "too big." But it is not the right size, in square or SD NTSC par. Could that make a difference?

Some users got errors when one or more slides had problems. Do a save as, delete all but one slideshow, and see if it will build.

You can also try putting the slideshows in a playlist to do a play all. But it should work either way; I don't think that is your problem.

Lost. Not familiar with actions. Also, I cannot (and no one should ever have to) resize an image to fit the deminsions of a screen. How are you supposed to see a tall picture?

Does anyone actually know what the VOBULATOR BLOCK PLANNER ERROR IS and how to fix it?

I will try to do them one at a time like you mentioned Stan, but I get sick thinking of Encore not being able to handle this workload. I'm already disgusted about the fact that encore won't let you do "random transitions". Pathetic. I gatto go buy some stupid $70 program to do what Encore can't.